Peter Behrens’ renowned art nouveau type from 1902 – with ornaments. Newly revised and neatly digitalized by Ingo Zimmermann In 1902, Peter Behrens (1869–1940), architect, designer and typographer, created a new ”German“ type which became very successful very quickly for the Rudhard’sche Gießerei (foundry which later became Gebr. Klingspor AG) in Offenbach am Main. It served, for example, as the official German type for the world expositions in 1904 and 1910. Behrens himself writes about the development of this type ”...For the actual form of my type, I took the technical principle of the Gothic script, the stroke of the quill feather. The proportions of height and width and the boldness of the strokes of the Gothic letters were also decisive for me in producing a German character. A cohesive character could be hoped for by avoiding all non-necessities and by strictly carrying out the design principle of holding the quill at an angle…“ By the way, when “long s” is activated, the typographically correct “round s” is automatically placed at the end of the word so that you need only pay attention to the correct s on syllable endings within words. When using “long s,” you must ensure the correct use of the rules for the Fraktur font: “round s” is always at the end of the word, also in compound words. For those of you who want to be even more correct, read the corresponding article in >> Wikipedia. Peter Behrens also drew matching ornaments for his typeface – we have likewise carefully revised these decorative touches and arranged them into a font. The "Behrens-Schrift" fits best on all topics that have something to do with art history or the time around 1900.

The famous Irish poet and novelist Jonathan Swift (Dublin 1667-1745) has a large personal library of which he noticed carefully the book list by himself. We have used a facsimile from this catalogue to reconstruct this present font, as one example of the poet’s personal hands but also as a typical example of the British quill pen handwriting from about mid 1600’s to the beginning of 1700’s . It is a “Pro” font containing Western (including Celtic) and Northern European, Icelandic, Baltic, Eastern, Central European and Turquish diacritics. The numerous alternates and ligatures allow to made the font looking as closely as possible to the real hand. Using an OTF software, the features allow to vary automatically almost each character of a word without anything to do but to select contextual alternates and standard ligatures and/or stylistic alternates options.

This family was inspired by the set of fonts used in the end of 1800s by the famous J. H. Geiger, printer in Lahr (Germany), especially these used to print an almanac for the year 1883. It is a Fraktur pattern, with two styles, as a few others incomplete fonts also used for this work were Blackletters from other patterns. Both were used in two size, for titles, subtitles, main text and notes. This font contains standard ligatures and German historical ligatures (German double s, long s, tz, ch, ck...) and diacritics. 1543 German Deluxe Initials may be used in complement this family.

SusiScript is an friendly, informal typeface family with three weights, each with an oblique style. The idea for SusiScript came from a girl named Suzi who wrote her "e"s in a peculiar way. The typeface does not replicate her handwriting, which was very hard to read; it merely drew inspiration from several of her letters.

There is a particular charm about traditional, hand executed sign writing. There is also something magical about watching an experienced sign writer at work with his sign writer's dagger (don't worry, it's a specially shaped paintbrush), watching the elegant lettering formed by deft brushstrokes. The Dewhirst family of five decorative faces is inspired by an elegant specimen of just such hand painted sign writing seen while I was out and about one day. Use this family of five faces to add a special touch of flair.